Inequality seems
to be on everyone’s radar these days. Barack Obama has declared it
the “defining issue” of our time. The American public’s
appetite for a 700-page book explaining the economics of inequality
has Harvard University Press scrambling to fill orders. And the
recent “Money Issue” of the New
York Times Magazine weighed in on May
4, evoking Jacob Riis’s 1890 exposé of Lower East Side tenement
squalor, How the Other Half Lives, with this cover headline:

The Magazine’s
“Money Issue” is only the latest evidence that the collective
distress over disparity is stimulating a revival of Progressive-era
thinking: prominent historians, economists, and former government
officials have all issued explicit calls for a return to
Progressivism. The Magazine
deserves close attention, however, because it captures various
pitfalls of heeding that call if we don’t maintain some critical
historical perspective.

One reporter’s
commentary, noting the political unlikelihood of large tax increases
on the wealthy, stresses the equalizing potential of education,
echoing (without invoking) Progressive-era philanthropists and
educational reformers such as Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller,
Andrew Mellon, and John Dewey. “The great income gains for the American middle class and poor in
the mid-to-late 20th century,” he writes, “came after this
country made high school universal and turned itself into the most
educated nation in the world.”

This distorts
history by conflating sequence and causation. Progressive
philanthropists and advocates of universal secondary education, while
providing avenues for individual
social mobility, did not bring about widespread democratization.
Workers’ movements, redistributionist programs, and protective
labor legislation during the Depression preceded education as the
cause of increasing equality, ensuring a more equitable division of
wartime and postwar economic growth thereafter…in part through
increased funding for education!

The mid-century
educational boom, in other words, was primarily an effect,
not a cause of economic leveling. In the earlier era of inequality,
educational opportunities and the chance to take advantage of them
remained off-limits for most Americans (and immigrants) for reasons
of race, national origin, gender, and (most importantly, because it
transcended all those categories) money. That is the case again
today.

Another piece in
the Magazine provides
a glimpse into the life of teenagers in the Brownsville, Brooklyn
projects. This article, “On the Brink in Brownsville,” updates
How the Other Half Lives for
2014, presenting mostly bourgeois readers with alarming
conditions—including domestic abuse in teenage relationships,
violence as play, and normalized petty theft—in a low-income urban
area.

Riis’s reports
from the city’s “dark corners” may have launched the
Progressive Era, but his lurid tales and graphic photographs of
non-white delinquency also fed racist and xenophobic fears (it did
not help that Riis was himself a racist). The Brownsville story falls into this Progressive-era trap. Its
detached account of a black community’s apparent apathy to mob
behavior, and its concluding anecdote of its black teenage subject’s
smirking about plans “to hang out in the neighborhood again this
summer”—absent any meaningful form of analysis—are like
cattle-prods for racism.

A quick glance at
Times readers’
online comments confirms this: the bulk of them, including the seven
top “Reader’s Picks” as of Tuesday afternoon, spew bile about
“sociopathology,” a lack of “discipline and purpose,” and
“subcultures…based on laziness, stupidity, and an
incomprehensible tendency to ‘blame somebody else.’ ” Without deeper insight into the political-economic roots of
conditions in Brownsville, the Magazine’s
story tends to incite reaction instead of inspiring intervention.

The cover story, meanwhile, describes “an
exercise in ‘radical empathy’ ” between students at the
$43,000-per-year Fieldston Ethical Culture School, and University
Heights High, a public school in the poorest area of the Bronx. As
the story explains, each student paired up with one from the other
school, shared a story “that in some way defined them,” and then
recounted the partner’s anecdote as if it were his or her own.

Bourgeois
Progressives made similar, or even more ambitious attempts to meet
New York’s working poor on “equal” terms. Some, such as Lillian
Wald, moved to the Lower East Side to live among immigrant workers in
settlement houses. Wealthy women, such as Alva Belmont and Anne Tracy
Morgan (J.P.’s daughter), joined immigrant socialists Pauline
Newman and Rose Schneiderman in the 1909-1910 strike of shirtwaist
makers. That strike galvanized the International Ladies’ Garment
Workers’ Union, one of twentieth-century New York’s most
progressive organizations, and a forerunner to the CIO.

The cross-class
mutual interests that emerged from such encounters between rich and
poor New Yorkers laid much of the intellectual groundwork for the
regulatory reform in public health, workplace safety, and urban
zoning that most people think of as among the Progressive Era’s
greatest successes in redressing inequality. So perhaps we should be
glad that a more recent generation of the affluent and afflicted are
reaching out to each other, and that the press is noticing.

But
Progressive-era New Yorkers indulged in less inspiring exercises in
“radical empathy” across class lines, and the Magazine’s
story reflects these as well.

On Christmas,
1899, thousands of the city’s poor gathered on the arena floor at
Madison Square Garden for a dinner of suckling pig and cranberry
relish, courtesy of the Salvation Army. Meanwhile, as the New-York
Tribune reported, “thousands of
well-fed and prosperous people” paid a dollar each to congregate in
the mezzanine and watch the poor eat. One organizer of the event
declared, “It means the dawning of a new era, the bridging of the
gulf between the rich and the poor.” Most newspapers celebrated the event in similar terms the next day.

Comparing this
event to the Fieldston and University Heights exercise may seem
unfair. The Salvation Army made little effort to mask the sheer class
voyeurism of its Christmas Dinner, whereas the contemporary high
schoolers shared personal stories and made honest attempts to inhabit
each other’s experiences.

Yet for the
Progressive-era New York newspapers and the Magazine’s
May 4 “Money Issue,” the accounts of such cross-class encounters
serve the same purpose: to offer their readers hope that the
inequality gap might be bridgeable through improved education,
empathy, or even proximity.

The Progressives
have more valuable lessons to teach us. The fact is, despite decades
of optimistic reformism, American income and wealth disparity
continued to increase until the Crash of 1929. Progressive reforms
made material differences in the lives of U.S. workers, but they
failed in their larger goal of slowing or reversing inequality.

At the same time,
those reforms necessitated the growth of the regulatory state. This
provided the foundation upon which New Deal workers and reformers
built to make real inroads against inequality—through legislation
protecting collective bargaining rights, restraining the power of
businessmen and financiers, and distributing the benefits of economic
growth far more widely than Progressives ever dreamed possible.

Progressives never
realized the full potential of the regulatory state to lessen
inequality because they were too busy trying to change the behavior
of the working class through educational
reform, racist moral crusades in low-income neighborhoods, and
empathy-building exercises. Rather than follow them down these
well-worn paths, we should emulate—and improve upon—New Deal-era
movements, using democracy to change the behavior that really needs
changing: the wealthy’s.